The world as it stands today, especially the industrialized
world, is fundamentally different from the world of any
yesteryear, the last decade and century, not to mention the past
that seems more the time of story than of history. Alan Bloom's
position, embraced by many intellectuals, is rooted in the
belief that people cannot be effective unless they build on the
foundation of historically confirmed values, in particular the
great books. But we are at a point of divergences with no
noticeably privileged direction, but with many, many options.
This is not a time of crisis, although some want us to believe
the contrary and are ready to offer their remedies: back to
something (authority, books, some primitive stage of no-ego, or
of the mushroom, i.e., psychedelic drugs, back to nature); or
fast forward to the utopia of technocracy, the information age,
the service society, even virtual reality or artificial life.
Humans are heuristic animals. Our society is one of creativity
and diversity, operating on a scale of human interaction to
which we exponentially add new domains: outer space, whose
dimensions can be measured only in light years, and whose period
of observation extends over lifetimes; the microcosmos, mirroring
the scale in the opposite direction of infinitesimal
differentiations; the new continents of man-made materials, new
forms of energy, genetically designed plants and animals, new
genetic codes, and virtual realities to experience new spaces,
new times, and new forms of mediation. Networking, which at its
current stage barely suggests things to come, can only be
compared to the time electricity became widely available.
Cognitive energy exchanged through networks and focused on
cooperative endeavors is part of what lies ahead as we
experience exponential growth on digital networks and fast
learning curves of efficient handling of their potential.
The past corresponds to a pragmatic framework well adapted to the
survival and development of humankind in the limited world of
direct encounters or limited mediations. In terms pertinent to a
civilization built around the notion of literacy, the current
lower levels of literacy can be seen as symptomatic of a crisis,
or even a breakdown. But what defines the new pragmatic context
is the shift from a literacy- centered model to one of multiple,
interconnected, and interconditioned, distributed literacies. It
is well justified to repeat that some of the most enlightened
minds overlook the pragmatics of bygone practice. Challenged,
confused, even scared by the change, they call for a journey to
the past: back to tradition, to discipline, to the ethics of our
forefathers, to old-time religion and the education that grew out
of it, to permanence, and hopefully to stability. Even those who
wholeheartedly espouse evolutionary and revolutionary models
seem to have a problem when it comes to literacy. All set to do
away with authority, they have no qualms about celebrating the
imperialism of the written word. Other minds confess to
difficulties in coping with a present so promising and, at the
same time, so confusing in its structural contradictions. What we
experience, from the extreme of moral turpitude to a disquieting
sense of mediocrity and meaninglessness, nourishes skeptical, if
not fatalistic, visions. The warning is out (again): We will end
up destroying humankind! Yet another part of the living present
accepts the challenge without caring about the implications it
entails. The people in this group give up their desire to
understand what happens, as long as this makes life exciting and
rewarding. Hollywood thrives on this. So do the industries of
digital smoke- and-mirrors, always a step from fame, and not much
farther from oblivion. Addresses on the Internet fade as quickly
as they are set up. The most promising links of yesterday show
up on the monitor as a "Sorry" message, as meaningful as their
short- lived presence was. Arguing with success is a sure recipe
for failure. Success deserves to be celebrated in its authentic
forms that change the nature of human existence in our
universe.
The future suggested in the labels technocracy, information age,
and service society might capture some characteristics of
today's world, but it is limited and limiting. This future fails
to accommodate the development of human activity at the new scale
in terms of population, resources, adaptation, and growth it has
reached. Within this model, its proponents preserve as the
underlying structure the current set of dependencies among the
many parts involved in human activity, and a stubborn
deterministic view of simplistic inclination. Unreflected
celebration of technocracy as the sole agent of change must be
treated with the same suspicion as its demonization. The current
participation of technology in human activity is indeed
impressive. So are the extent of information processing and
information mining, and the new relation between productive
activities and services. To make sense of disparate data and from
them form new productive endeavors is a formidable task.
Science, in turn, made available enormously challenging
theories and extremely refined models of the world.
But after all is done and said, these are only particular aspects
of a much more encompassing process. The result is a pragmatic
framework of a new condition. Highly mediated work, distributed
tasks, parallel modes, and generalized networking of rather
loosely coordinated individual experiences define this condition.
Within this framework, the connection between input (for
instance, work) and output (what results) is of a different
order of magnitude tfrom that between the force applied on a
lever and the outcome; or that between the energy necessary to
accomplish useful tasks through engines or electric, or
pneumatic devices, no matter how efficient, and the result. In
addition, even the distinction between input and output becomes
fuzzy. The wearable computer provides interoperability and
interconnectedness-an increase in a person's heart rate can be a
result of an increase in physical exertion or cause for
communicating with a doctor's office or for alerting the police
station (if an accident takes place). It might be that the next
interaction will involve our genetic code.
The capacity for language and the ability to understand its
various implications are only relatively interdependent, and
thus only relatively open to scrutiny and understanding. This
statement, as personal as it sounds, and as much as it expresses
probably less resignation than uncertainty, is crucial to the
integrity of this entire enterprise. Indeed, once within a
language, one is bound to look at the world surrounding oneself
from the perspective of that language as the medium for partial
self-constitution and evaluation. Participating in its dynamics
affects what I am able to see and describe. This affects also
what I am no longer able to perceive, what escapes my
perception, or even worse, filters it to the point that I see
only my own thoughts. This dual identity-observer and integral
part of the observed phenomena-raises ethical, axiological, and
epistemological aspects almost impossible to reconcile. Since
every language is a projection of ourselves-as participants in
the human experience, yet as distinct instantiations of that
experience-we do not see the world so much as ourselves in
relation to it, ourselves in establishing our culture, and again
ourselves in taming and appropriating the universe around us.
The fox in Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince says it much
better: "One only understands the things one tames."
"Between us the rift"
Huge industrial complexes where an immense number of workers
participate in the production of goods, and densely populated
urban centers gravitating around factories, make up the image
characteristic of industrial society. This image is strikingly
different from the new reality of interconnected, yet
decentralized, individual activities going well beyond
telecommuting. Various mediating elements contribute to
increasingly efficient practical experiences of human
self-constitution. The computer is one of the varied embodiments
of these mediating elements, but by no means the only one.
Through its functions, such as calculation, word, image, and
information processing, and control of manufacturing, it
introduces many layers between individuals and the object of
their actions. The technology of interconnecting provides means
for distributive task strategies. It also facilitates parallel
modes of productive work. This is a world of progressive
decentralization and interoperative possibilities. All kinds of
machines can be an address in this interconnected world. Their
operations can range from design tasks to computer-aided
manufacturing. Distributed work and cognitive functions
pertinent to it afford practical experiences qualitatively
different from the mechanical sequencing of tasks as we know it
from industrial modes of production.
Obviously, large portions of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, as
well as part of the European and North American continents, do
not necessarily fit this description in detail. Industrial
activities still constitute the dominant practical experience in
the world. Although nomadic and jungle tribes are part of this
integrated world, the Industrial Revolution has not yet reached
them all. In some cases, the stages leading to agriculture have
not yet been attained. In view of the global nature of human life
and activity today, I submit that despite the deep disparity in
the economic and social evolution of various regions of the
world, it is plausible to assume that centralized modes of
production peculiar to industrial economies are not a necessary
development. Efficiency expectations corresponding to the global
scale of human activity can be reached only by development
strategies different from those embodied in the pragmatic
framework of industrial activity. It is therefore probable that
countries, and even subcontinents, not affected by the
Industrial Revolution will not go through it. Planners with an
ecological bent even argue that developing countries should not
take the path that led industrial nations to augment their
population's living standard to the detriment of the environment
or by depleting natural resources (A German Manifest, 1992).
Industrial production and the related social structures rely on
literacy. Edmund Carpenter formulated this quite expressively:
"Translated into gears and levers, the book became machine.
Translated into people, it became army, chain of command,
assembly line...." His description, made in broad strokes, is to
the point. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution,
children and women became part of the labor market. For the very
limited operation one had to perform, no literacy was necessary;
and women and children were not literate. Still, the future
development of the industrial society could not take place
without the dissemination of literacy skills. For instance,
industry made possible the invention, in 1830, of the steel pen
indispensable to the compulsory elementary education that was
later instituted. The production of steel needles seemed to
extend domesticity, but actually created the basis for the sweat
trades following what Louis Mumford called carboniferous
capitalism. Gaslight and electricity expanded the time available
for the dissemination of literacy skills. Housing improvements
made possible the building of the individual library. George
Steiner sees this as a turning point in the sense that a private
context of the experience of the book was created.
As far as national structures were concerned, phenomena
characteristic of the Industrial Revolution cannot be understood
outside the wider context of the formation and consolidation of
nations. Affirmation of national identity is a process intimately
connected to the values and functions of literacy. The production
process of the industrial age of mechanical machinery and
electric power required not brute force, but qualified force.
Administrative and management functions required more literacy
than work on the assembly line. But literacy projected its
characteristics onto the entire activity, thus making a literate
workforce desirable. The market it generated projected the
condition of the industry in the structure of its transactions.
The requirements for qualified work expanded to requirements for
qualified market activities and resulted in the beginnings of
marketing and advertising. That market was based on the
recognition of national boundaries, i.e., boundaries of
efficiency, self-sufficiency, and future growth offering markets
of a size and complexity adequate to industrial output. Nations
replaced the coarse fragmentation of the world. They were no
longer, as Jean-Marie Guéhenno notices, a disguise of tribal
structures, but a political space within which democracy could
be established.
Progression from competing individual life and temporary
congregation in an environment of survival of the fittest to
tribal, communal, local, confederate, and national life is
paralleled by progression in the forms and methods of human
integration. The global scale of human activity characteristic
of our age is not an extension of the linear, deterministic
relations between those constituting a valid human entity and the
life-support system, called environment, that structurally define
industrial society. Discontinuity in numbers (of people,
resources, expectations, etc.), in the nature of the relations
among people, in the forms of mediations that define human
practical experiences is symptomatic of the depth and breadth of
change. The end of nations, of democracy even, might be far off,
but this end is definitory of the chasm before us. The United
Nations, which does not yet comprise the entire world, is a
collection of over 197 nations, and increasing. Some are only
island communities, or newly proclaimed independent countries
brought about by social and political movements. Of the over 240
distinct territories, countries, and protectorates, very few (if
any) are truly autarchic entities. Despite never before
experienced integration, our world is less the house of nations
and discrete alliances among them, and more the civilization of a
species in firm control (too firm, as some perceive) of other
species.
Within the world, we know that there are people still coming out
of an age of natural economy based on hunting, foraging,
fishing, and rudimentary agriculture. While barter and the
minimal language of survival is the only market process in such
places, in reality, the world is already involved in global
transactions. Markets are traded in their entirety, more often
than not without the knowledge of those comprising these markets.
This only goes to show again the precarious nature of national
structures. National independence, passionately fought for, is
less a charter for the future than the expression of the memory
of the past (authentic or fake). Selling or buying extends to
the entire economy, which while still at a stage difficult to
entirely explain, is bound to change in a rhythm difficult to
cope with by those supposed to control it, but inescapable in
the context of world-wide market. That literacy and national
identity share in this condition should not surprise anyone.